Comcast, Verizon Outages Leave Solano County Residents, Without Internet, TV, Cell Service
SOLANO COUNTY (CBS13) — An outage in Solano County left many unable to make calls, watch TV or use their cellphones on Friday.
By Friday night, service was restored to Comcast and Verizon customers affected by the outage.
But earlier in the day, there was no surfing the Web at Jamon Sigler's house.
"I need to be able to get on the computer and look up information and things that are important and imperative to what i need to do," he said.
At the peak of the problem, it wasn't just Comcast, but also a Verizon outage. Cable TV, home Internet and phones, as well as cellphones were affected from Vacaville to Fairfield.
Fran Rodgers' home phone didn't have a dial tone, and her Comcast cable TV was down as well.
"that's all you get when you change the channel," she said, showing CBS13 her TV. "You get 'This channel should be available shortly.'"
"Shortly," however, turned into all day.
A Comcast representative says crews drilling into the ground at a Fairfield street corner hit a fiber optic data line.
Repairs were tedious. A worker told us they had to splice 192 delicate glass fibers by hand.
The Verizon outage last four hours before most service was restored by 6:30 p.m. The vast majority of Comcast customers were back online before 9 p.m.
Ironically, Comcast says, the construction who who apparently caused the outage was doing work for Zayo Group, a networking company. A Comcast spokesman says they may have been trying to lay some fiber optic cable of their own when they accidentally cut Comcast's cable.
Affected customers can contact Comcast directly if they want a break on their bill. The company is handling that on a case-by-case basis.